STREET CREW KITS ARE HERE

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Get yours today for free! Just DM mr.thirty.seven on Instagram to get your official street crew kit! Each kit includes a limited edition card, three stickers, and a dope pin! If ghosts are following you, let everyone know with this exclusive FREE kit! Limited quantity available!

Final Updates

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All formatting and a final read-through on the formatted manuscript has been completed for Fates and Curses. I think the page count is 355 (I’m so tired). The only thing I’m waiting for now is the spine and back cover, which should be ready for edits by Monday.

I’ve also completed the ebook files for The Warning and Unrequited, so if ebooks are your thing, I got you fam: Click here to purchase The Warning in ebook format. 

Promotional stickers have been ordered and you can check out the design below. The stickers were originally going to be 3×3 or something like that, but after working with the printer on sizing I got 150% more stickers than I originally ordered for free, and they will be 3 x 1.9! I’ll be sprinkling New Orleans with over 150 of them the weekend of Chewbacchus and the rest I’ll be handing out at various festivals throughout the year.
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Promo postcards for The Warning and Fates and Curses also coming soon!
I’ll also be adding an appearances section to the website soon, with a list of festivals I’ll be at this year selling books, signing books, drawing portraits, giving away free stuff, etc., so stay tuned.

The Making of Fates and Curses

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The last read-through for Fates and Curses is officially complete. After massive rewrites, I’m very happy with where I’ve landed, especially when it comes to pacing. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more involved in promoting my work, so I thought I’d talk a bit about the process I went through writing Fates and Curses.

 

Aside from the fact that The Warning got a complete rewrite due to the original manuscript being stolen during Hurricane Katrina, Fates and Curses had an insane overhaul and A LOT of rewrites, so I thought it would be fun to share some of that journey here on the blog.
The Warning began in 2001 as a comic project between me and a group of friends. The project was called Black Star, and the basic story was pretty similar to what The Warning would grow into: set in a post-apocalyptic future, a group of teenagers go on a radical adventure to get revenge on a corporate overlord.
Although the names were different, the characters of Alice, Basil, Caleb, Hiro, and Victor Solomon were all present in the original comic (in fact, I don’t think I even changed Victor Solomon’s name). Plot wise, they never changed much from their original incantations. Of course kids grow up, but even after we lost interest in making the comic, I remained really interested in these characters and continued trying to work on the comic on my own. I entered my own version of Black Star, renamed Étoile Noir  in Tokyopop’s Rising Stars of Manga (A manga drawing contest that ran from 2002-2008). It was around then that I began drafting the story as a novel, slowly expanding on the universe and fleshing out the characters.
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Part of the splash page from the manga. Toned by hand.
At some point after losing the original  Étoile Noir manuscript, The Warning was born, and the characterization got an overhaul as the story expanded into not only a novel, but an entire universe. . .The Warning wasn’t actually about a radical teenage suicide mission. For me, it was a tragedy centered around a handful of bros who are brought together under terrible circumstances, each with their own baggage and motives. Like the original comic, the main events of the book span less than seven days, while a third of the novel is actually a prequel, all of these happenings becoming part of the exploding pressure cooker which is them finally coming together for their radical teenage suicide mission.
The Warning is definitely a tragedy, and that was the set-up for Fates and Curses: In The Warning, the characters GET fucked up, and in Fates in Curses, the characters ARE fucked up, dealing with the painful repercussions of what they’ve all lived through.
The original draft of Fates and Curses was actually completed about four years ago, but the project sat on a metaphorical shelf while I worked on other manuscripts. After The Warning was published, I pulled out the file, blew the dust off, and dove back in, quickly realizing that the characters had evolved not only since that first draft, but forcefully through the publication of The Warning.

Fates and Curses UPDATE

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Only six months past due, Fates and Curses is finally in the last stages of editing. The struggle was real. It’s been a difficult past few months trying to get through numerous rewrites, but the pain was definitely worth it. I can’t wait to share the conclusion of this story which I began writing as a ninth grader in 2002. Yes, SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO! 2018 was a tough year, but I’m fired up for 2019, and can’t wait to get Fates and Curses out into the world so I can focus on my next work, Ouroboros, my second book of poetry, Dineros on the Dance Floor, and my first work of non-fiction, Theatre of War.

Here’s the bad news though: Because I’ve been so focused the past few months on Fates and Curses, I didn’t even let myself look at Ouroboros -so I didn’t notice that the file had completely disappeared from my work computer! FUCK!!! I have a backup that is about 60% of what I’d written, about 30-40% of the book itself, so at least there’s that. I have no one to blame but myself, and I’m hoping that when I go through all my jump drives I’ll find the complete draft. If not, well, version two will be even better because I know that the 80% I’ve completed needed extensive rewrites anyway. I’d actually completed the entire manuscript for The Warning in 2005, only to have my laptop stolen during Hurricane Katrina, thus losing the entire draft at one point and having to start over from scratch -easily one of the most demoralizing things to ever happen to me as a writer that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Good times!
Update: I found a full back-up of the manuscript on my home PC. WEW LADS.
I’ll hopefully be able to share the cover of Fates and Curses within the next week, so stay tuned!